“Always.”
“There’s nowhere to go. We’d be lost in an hour in all this and then end up starving or dying of thirst or found again. The guards don’t even bother watching us anymore,” Dain said.
“Have you any idea how they find their way through here?”
“No. Do you?”
Nico shrugged his narrow shoulders. “A guess or two. I spoke with Jensen today, when we drank at the pond. There have been four different guides in all. It seems likely any of them, any of the cranes, can do it.”
One of the nearby guards turned toward them. Dain closed his eyes and feigned sleep. The rules against talking were even stricter at night than in the daytime.
Some time later he drifted off.
On the tenth day, Nico fell.
They had stopped for water at another of the shallow, stagnant pools and, less than a mile later, he began to cough. Deep, heaving coughs without end. Hands covering his mouth to stifle the noise, he stumbled on. Oddly, the Tyberons hadn’t complained about the noise yet. They seemed unusually relaxed today, even talking among themselves.
Nico leaned down, vomited, and collapsed.
Dain looked down at him, dumbfounded. This morning he’d seemed fine. Tired, like they all were, but otherwise fine. Had Nico ate or drank something that didn’t agree with him? The water. There had been some larvae in the water. Had he drank one?
Dain imagined the emotionless spear coming. If Nico fell, they would both die. He placed his hands on the Pyre Rider and tried to sense the problem. He would have to try healing him.
The merc behind Dain, a big, belligerent man called Ox, planted a muddy boot on Nico’s outstretched arm and laughed.
“Look boys, our protector fell. The big, bad Pyre Rider fell,” Ox bellowed, pointing. His partner-in-chains, Kern, a greasy scarecrow of a man, laughed along.
“No! Save us, save us great Rider,” Kern wailed in mock dismay, clutching at his chest.
Dain knew these two—every prisoner did. They’d been trouble from the beginning. The first day after their capture Ox kicked another man’s ankle and shattered it. Unable to keep up, the unlucky man and his partner had fallen back and been speared.
Since then, Dain took care to avoid the pair. But this morning he had been too tired and too lost in thoughts of escape to notice their approach. A mistake, he knew now, and one he needed to correct before Ox killed Nico outright and Dain ended up with a spear in the guts.
“Not so tough without your spells, now are you?” Ox said. He leaned on Nico’s arm.
Nico’s eyes opened. There was pain and anger in them, and he clenched his jaw to remain silent. The guards might allow some talking today, but a scream wouldn’t be tolerated.
Dain shoved the big merc back. He pulled Nico to his feet and placed himself between the Pyre Rider and Ox. With the clamps covering his hands, the little man would be useless in a fight. He stared up at the larger Ox and readied himself.
“Coward,” he said.
“What’d you call me, little man?” Ox asked, sounding almost casual.
Kern stopped laughing. His eyes took on a devilish light.
Only compared to Ox could Dain be considered little. The bigger man outweighed Dain’s two hundred and twenty pounds by another forty or so, and he stood three inches taller than Dain’s six-foot-two.
“You heard me you deaf piece of dung. I said you’re a Light-damned coward.”
Ox clenched a fist of iron and swung.
Dain sidestepped the punch and slugged the bigger man’s ribs. His fist felt like it met a shield, but Ox staggered. Dain retreated a step and hoped Nico was wise enough to stay behind.
He was ready for another punch when the little man surprised him. Instead of falling back, Nico darted forward and kicked Kern’s knee from the side. Dain heard an ugly pop and the greasy man’s leg bent sideways at a painful-looking angle.
Kern yelled, and a nearby guard speared him in the throat. The merc’s screams fell away to a bloody gurgle. In vain he clutched at the wound, but couldn’t control the bleeding.
Ox moved quickly then, no doubt realizing the dire situation he was now in, and reached out to grab at the chain that connected Dain and Nico. He caught it and yanked the pair closer.
Dain didn’t bother trying to pull away. Ox was too strong, and pulling away would just move Nico closer to him and his iron fists. All he had to do was injure one of them and they would fall behind the group and die.
Dain threw a loop in the chain and caught it around Ox’s forearm. He rushed the bigger merc, slipping behind him and jerking the chain—along with the trapped arm—against his chest.
Nico must have understood his intent. The Pyre Rider raced behind Ox in the opposite direction. He crossed his end of chain over Dain’s.
Instead of a trapped arm, Ox’s neck was now inside the loop, drawn tight. The frantic merc thrashed, arm and leg and bucked back, trying to break free. But Dain and Nico each held fast.
At last, Ox’s face went purple. The veins at his neck swelled and bulged. He fell to his knees. Nico stepped in front of him to face the mercenary.
“Not so close,” Dain tried to warn him.
Ox moved then, reaching for the Pyre Rider one last time. He strained forward and grabbed Nico’s shirt. Nico tore at the merc’s hands, but couldn’t free himself. Ox finally wrenched at the shirt, trying to draw Nico closer. He managed only to tear the shirt off instead.
His face an angry purple mask, the mercenary gasped a last breath and fell with a jarring thud to the dirt.
Dain jerked on the chain one final time, crushing Ox’s windpipe to be sure. Wiping sweat from his eyes, he looked at Nico. If the Pyre Rider was injured, if Ox had managed to crush his ankle or knee, they would still be in serious trouble.
I might be able to heal it. To save himself he would certainly try.
But the little man was whole. During the fight he’d lost his turban, revealing his face.
The rumors claimed that the Pyre Riders were horribly disfigured from their flames. But Nico had a smooth, bald head and no scarring at all. He certainly didn’t look like demon spawn. Freckles dotted his nose and cheeks. His eyes were olive shaped and a dark shade of brown. Tears fell from them.
Odd—I can see no injuries. Perhaps he is just badly shaken. Dain checked him over again to make sure.
His eyes stopped at Nico’s chest.
Nico’s shirt had been shredded open by Ox’s grasping fists, and with her free arm she covered a pair of small, round breasts.
CHAPTER FIVE
The walking continued. The second week passed. The days droned on. Step by step, Dain and Nico droned on with them. Their feet ached. Blisters formed. They cracked and bled and formed anew.
Many of the other mercs were worse off. They fashioned crude moccasins from their shirts or jackets, but inevitably those who struggled dropped back and, along with their unfortunate partners, met their deaths on Tyberon spears.
Dain heaved a sigh. He focused on putting one foot ahead of the other.
Balerion was wrong, the grass goes on forever.
It rippled in the wind like waves on the ocean, an endless sea of green. As a scout, he had an unerring sense of direction, but only by the sun and stars could he tell which way they faced. He had tried constructing a map in his head, but gave up after the first few days. The Tyberons’ constant twisting and turning still seemed random. Their crane-feathered guides changed direction half a dozen times each day.
Several more times they found shallow lakes among the grass, and once it rained all through the night—heavy, soaking drops that stung the eyes and made restful sleep impossible. The next day he could feel the thick humidity weighing him down, and it took effort just to breathe.
He glanced ov
er at Nico. He—she, he corrected himself— plodded along beside him.
The Tyberons hadn’t cared Nico was a woman. An enemy was an enemy, Dain guessed. Women warriors weren’t unheard of. He had seen or heard or read about several lands where females fought alongside the men. Outwardly, Nico hadn’t changed, but Dain noticed her eyes constantly scanning in all directions. She acted more like a skittering sparrow than the ruthless bringer of death she’d been before.
No use blaming her for that. Not after the last few days.
Twice, Dain had fought men off her. He would have thought with all the marching the captured mercenaries would be too tired to try anything, but they proved resilient.
After the second man nursed a broken arm the other would-be paramours got the message. Wilhem, the mercenary chained to Jensen, seemed to be having the same problem. Though the other Pyre Rider remained covered, the other prisoners had assumed that he too was actually a woman.
Their captors continued to keep their watch at night. Dain could sense their nervousness and indeed it seemed to grow worse as the days passed and the green sea deepened. He never saw any sign of what the savages feared. Perhaps they are just superstitious, fearing the night itself. But that made little sense—they certainly hadn’t been afraid during their night raids on the posts or the Esterian army.
The rising sun seemed to drive away these unseen dangers. From their postures he could tell they feared little in the daytime.
Dain’s original captor led them again. He walked like the others, with arms outstretched and palms open, but unlike the other cranes, who took slow, steady steps, he set a faster pace.
The column had just set off after a short break at noon when something vast and unseen shifted in the grass ahead.
As one, the Tyberons froze. The mercs followed their lead; whatever frightened their fierce captors they had cause to fear as well. The grasses stirred and, for a brief second, Dain thought he saw a monstrous scaled tail rise and then fall off to his right. From force of habit, he felt for the hilt of his missing sword, then realized his mistake and shook his head.
Poor time to be defenseless.
He glanced at Nico. She stood with her hands held out, ready to cast. He tugged their common chain and she shot him a venomous look. He stared deliberately down at her clamp-covered hand.
She followed his look and, when she saw the clamp, her eyes widened as if it were a death adder. She turned her eyes back to him, an unspoken apology mingling with the realization and fear there.
For half an hour no one moved. Sweat beaded up and dripped down Dain’s forehead. He made no move to wipe it lest the chain rattle. The grasses skittered and shook and a loud snort came from off to their left. Then, finally, whatever beast lurked ahead, whatever they had disturbed, lay silent.
A second crane, one with gray in his hair, led the army back, away from the sound’s source. Later, when they were miles away, he and Dain’s captor stood alone. Both men faced each other. The older man jammed his finger into the younger man’s chest and spoke in firm tones.
Though he didn’t understand their language, Dain had seen soldiers disciplined before. The old warrior’s expressions reminded him of his father when he had dressed down one of his men.
At last the older warrior returned to the lead. The younger scowled and stomped off in a huff.
“Not happy, is he,” Nico commented.
She hadn’t spoken since Ox’s death. Her voice had grown higher in pitch now that she made no secret of her identity.
“No, I would say he made a pretty bad mistake back there. Did you see anything?”
“I thought…no, nothing. Did you?”
He heard the hesitation. Had Nico seen the tail, too? He was about to reply when the butt of a spear jammed into his side.
They walked on for another four days. Twice they found small lakes, and on the third day it rained all morning. Their captors didn’t care. Despite the mud, they led them on.
At last, when Dain thought they had traveled a hundred miles, they emerged into an open field. There was no warning; one minute they were in the stifling grass, and the next they stepped into the clear.
He looked out and stretched his vision as far as it would go.
Before them was a city. Not a small adobe village like the one they’d conquered, but a great sprawling city on a hill, with gleaming white buildings bristling skyward like quills on the back of an enormous hedgehog.
A city of this size must hold at least a hundred thousand Tyberons, Dain guessed, his mouth falling open at the sight.
Like the village, but on a far larger scale, a patchwork of green fields and orchards reached out from the hill in all directions. Irrigation water poured through deep canals, linking the fields in a perfect web. The field’s runoff collected into a tranquil lake that surrounded the city like a castle’s moat.
At the clearing’s edge stood a solitary, flat-topped tower. On its roof was a gear-driven tripod and a telescope pointed toward the heavens.
Dain gawked at it. How could these people, seemingly primitive as they were, create such a thing? The village’s simple adobe huts he could believe. But this…this city, the precise layout of the fields, irrigation, and an observatory? It would take years—no, decades—of planning, coordination, and engineering. The Tyberons had to be much more sophisticated than they appeared.
The guards led the group around the edge of the fields. They talked among themselves, louder than before. A few laughed—a sound Dain had never heard coming from any Tyberon. They held their spears loose with a casual grace.
“Look at that pump,” Nico whispered. She stood at his shoulder.
Dain followed her gaze. Two robed Tyberons, unfeathered and indistinguishable from any other person, stood behind a white stone pedestal in a field of lettuce. The robed men had stopped working and were watching the new arrivals.
“What about it?”
“Look at the Magentite.”
A polished Magentite gem the size of Dain’s fist lay atop the pump almost haphazardly. A stone that size would sell for tens of thousands in gold, and yet the Tyberons had it laying out in the open on the edge of a field.
One of the robed men placed the gem into a shallow bowl atop the pedestal. The second cast a spell, and water poured from a hole in the pedestal’s side.
A gem of that size and they are using it to water their fields.
“With one of those, I could burn a path a mile wide from here to the river in a single night,” Nico said. “I could burn that entire city to the ground. I could burn anything.” Her eyes took on a frenzied light.
Dain rattled the chain gently and she looked down at the clamp on her hands.
“I could burn anything,” she mumbled, more to herself than to him. She kept her head down.
“Is Nico your real name?” Dain asked. When she didn’t answer, he asked again and nudged her with his elbow. She shook her head then looked up at him.
“Nicola.”
They continued around the city, skirting the field’s edges, until they were almost exactly opposite where they had first emerged. The Tyberons led them into a deep quarry.
Hundreds of shackled prisoners, mostly men and exclusively Tyberon, labored with chisel and hammer there, cutting blocks of white stone. Like the captured army, they too were chained in pairs.
Near the quarry’s bottom, a group of mages directed four towering rock elementals, and the man-shaped beings lifted the finished blocks and then carried them away with little effort. Dozens of lark-feathered guards milled around, watching the prisoners.
Each of the paired army survivors were led past the quarry’s iron gates and into a small adobe building. Dain and Nicola fell into line there and slowly advanced toward the back.
Their first stop was a gr
oup of grimy blacksmiths. Without a word, they adjusted Dain and Nicola’s shackles. Dain’s was moved from his wrist down to his ankle. Nicola’s hands were freed from the clamps then reshackled into wrist cuffs lined with grape-sized Magentites.
If she attempted to cast now, the gems would amplify her spell and burn off her arm. A long length of chain was attached from her left cuff to Dain’s ankle.
One of the guards motioned with his spear and they joined a second line that headed out the building’s rear.
A pair of Tyberons waited for them at the doorway, along with a man chained to the wall. His clothes were threadbare and the Magentite-encrusted shackle about his wrist loose. His ribs showed beneath the thin clothing.
He must have been larger when they first chained him, maybe Wilhem’s size, Dain thought.
The prisoner spoke in perfect Common when they reached the line’s end.
“You are now property of the Frexe Tyberons. Graciously they have allowed you to live and pay penance for your crimes. Doing so will earn forgiveness and mercy from the gods.” He spoke without emotion, voice drained of all hope.
A Tyberon handed Dain a rolled leather pouch. It clanked when he took it.
“These are your tools. You will cut stone. Your partner,” the man shifted his gaze to Nicola, “will measure the blocks. One rod in every direction, then split in half. Complete two per day. The first is for forgiveness, the second for your life.”
To Nicola the Tyberons handed a long measuring rod and water pouch.
Without further ceremony, a guard led them to a section of the quarry and the labor began.
Six months they worked. Nicola measured and marked. Dain cut. They always finished the first block before noon. After that, the pace slowed. The second block wasn’t due until morning, and there was no reward for cutting extra blocks, no slack the following day. That was one of the first lessons the slaves learned.
River of Spears (Kingdom's Forge Book 0) Page 7
